Sources uncover new eye candy, smart font collections, a security certificate assistant, and more in some of the latest development builds of Apple next-generation operating system.

Smart Font Collections

Along with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" will come the first major update to Apple's font management application, labeled Font Book 2.0. In addition to more flexible validation features, recent builds of the application feature smart font collections.

Much like the smart mailboxes technology coming to Mail 2.0, smart font collections will allow users to automatically generate groups of fonts based on their attributes. Some of the attributes available for use are font name, family, style, kind, languages, and Postscript name. Similarly, Font Book searches can also be based off the same set of attributes in the new version.

Additional Font Book improvements are said include a font validation manager, and the ability to create separate font libraries and export font selections, sources said.

Added Security Options

Continuing to focus on one of the strengths of Mac OS XsecurityApple has developed a "Certificate Assistant" that will likely find its way into the shipping version of Tiger.

"This assistant will help you create a 'digital certificate,' which keeps your information secure by verifying your identity when you transfer over a network or the internet," reads one of the application's info panels.

Identities will be stored in a user's keychain. The assistant can also be used to evaluate existing certificates, request a certificate from the Certificate Authority (CA), or issue certificates to other users.

More Default Screen Savers

Screen savers remain a popular and handy feature of Mac OS X, and Tiger will reportedly include at least two new offerings in this area. One of the new screen savers, Apple News, extracts Apple's Hot News content from an XML document and displays it amongst an array of colors and trademark Apple images. As second addition, called iTunes artwork, will gather a user's iTunes album art collection and and display it as animated tiles that alternate with the help of flip-motion effects.

With each new seed of Tiger, Apple has continued to add and refine features. Some other notable changes to the system include a Startup Disk control panel that can set volumes to boot in target disk mode, a microphone calibration assistant, and an ever evolving Keychain application interface.

Apple has said that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger will ship within the first half of 2005. And while several rumors have hinted at a release as early as January, it's extremely unlikely that Apple could wrap up the development of the new system within the next two months, considering a large majority of its features are still seeing modifications.

Earlier this week, AppleInsider reported on QuickTime and Family Control enhancements in Tiger.

is it me or isn't it strange to see the beatles' "revolver" album cover artwork as one of the screensavers alongside U2's artwork. last time i checked, the artwork only came from music available through itunes. this seems odd for a company in material litigation with the beatles, IMO.

Originally posted by grabberslasherFYI the Microphone Calibration feature was present in the WWDC build of Tiger.

That looks exactly like the "Microphone Volume" window in the Listening panel of the Speech Preferences window, except for the text. Does it actually function differently? I find the whole speech thing (both speaking and listening) very disappointing since I've seen very little improvement since 1997 (System 7.5-8.0). My Dual 2GHz G5 doesn't seem to be much more accurate at recognizing my spoken commands than my Performa 6400/200 was.

And don't get me started with the voices! It's almost the exact same set from 1997 (and before for all I know) and most of them are jokes. Can you imagine listening to a page of text read by Bubbles? Bad news? Hysterical? There should be a wide range of normal voices and I wish you could add third-party ones like you can get everything from fonts to icons elsewhere.

I think third party voices, while a nice idea, would be expensive and probably not much better than Apple's. What Apple really needs to do for text to speech is either improve their underlying technology or license from IBM.

What really gets me is the fact that we still can't overlay screensavers. After Dark used to be able to do this... and with OpenGL you'd think it'd be so much easier. What am I missing? why doesn't Apple do this? Lame.

Originally posted by 5150is it me or isn't it strange to see the beatles' "revolver" album cover artwork as one of the screensavers alongside U2's artwork. last time i checked, the artwork only came from music available through itunes. this seems odd for a company in material litigation with the beatles, IMO.

Beatles album art can be found on the web then dragged and dropped into iTunes. I've done it with the 17 Beatles CDs that I've imported into iTunes.

Originally posted by 5150is it me or isn't it strange to see the beatles' "revolver" album cover artwork as one of the screensavers alongside U2's artwork. last time i checked, the artwork only came from music available through itunes. this seems odd for a company in material litigation with the beatles, IMO.

Well, this is just a guess, but I assumed that the screenshots came from Kaspar's (or someone associated to AI) computer, not Apple. So its on their disk (unless you expect all Mac users to shun Beatle's music until they stop their lawsuits).

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Originally posted by ChevalierMalFetWhat really gets me is the fact that we still can't overlay screensavers. After Dark used to be able to do this... and with OpenGL you'd think it'd be so much easier. What am I missing? why doesn't Apple do this? Lame.

Well, not knowing what you mean by overlay, I can't say for sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say "Its a screen saver, who cares!". My screen is set to go to sleep within 5-10 minutes of inactivity, as I would hope most people's are (despite using less energy, it helps increase the longevity of the backlights of LCDs), so I couldn't really say what a screen saver does (and, in fact, if I'm at my computer, its likely the screen saver wouldn't be kicking in at all).

To answer another question: yes, screen savers are considered eye candy.

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Originally posted by grabberslasherI don't know how I missed this before - Quicktime in Tiger is now a Cocoa app. It's been totally rewritten. Very cool!!!

Hopefully Finder is next.

Writing (or rewriting) in Cocoa is one of the most overblown and overemphasised task people seem to ask about. Rewriting the Finder in Cocoa will do very little to make it better, unless they actually re-code it so it performs better. Cocoa won't make it perform better. Re-working the code to make it more threaded (and less likely to stall waiting for this/that/other-thing) is much more important.

Originally posted by HeadyAny signs of font auto-activation in Font Book 2.0? It's pretty much a requirement for any design work involving type.

I wouldn't count on it. Apple's been getting killed lately from people for usurping thrid-party segments. And this is one huge third-party segment.

It would be nice, however, if they included:
- better internal support/hooks for activating fonts on the fly
- improved font file handling to keep people from causing errors just removing a font they weren't told not to remove.

While I totally agree screensavers are eye candy, and completely deny that it then has no market potential because of this; what I meant by overlay was using transparency/masking to play one screensaver over the other. Something obviously OpenGL run visuals would excel at.

While I totally agree screensavers are eye candy, and completely deny that it then has no market potential because of this; what I meant by overlay was using transparency/masking to play one screensaver over the other. Something obviously OpenGL run visuals would excel at.

Ok, but for what potential? Overlaying the 'beach' screen saver on top of the 'star field' screen saver doesn't seem to be much in the way of a market. Do you have any examples or know of screen savers that such a thing actually serves a purpose (I'm asking this on my assumption that screen savers, while useful back in the 80s/early 90s to prevent screen burn-in, do nothing now except look pretty).

Louzer, by the time After Dark and such really went bonzo in the 90's screen savers were actually fairly useless for the average new CRT. In reality, then, they were doing nothing but looking pretty. After Dark had an engine to overlay one atop the other... it was fairly useful in some instances and fun to play with in others. Especially for people that have two screensavers showing useful information or one showing it another with audible info... basically a way to combine the functionality of screensavers that only partially serve your needs.

Personally, I'd like to run a screen saver that runs a QT Movie with another overlayed that displays scrolling text. Useful from a Kiosk standpoint.

Could someone who has Tiger, post what versions of iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD are included in Tiger? In other words, does the currently available version of Tiger include the same versions of applications as iLife 04 or as in Panther? Does Tiger also include Garageband?

Originally posted by ChevalierMalFetWhile I totally agree screensavers are eye candy, and completely deny that it then has no market potential because of this; what I meant by overlay was using transparency/masking to play one screensaver over the other. Something obviously OpenGL run visuals would excel at.

Mac OS X can do this since the day of 10.0

There's a screensaver that can display how many emails you have and overlay it on other screensaver. It haven't been updated in the longest time so I wouldn't expect it to work with Panther: